Leading learning in Asia – emerging empirical insights from five societies

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to synthesize findings from studies of principal instructional leadership conducted in five East Asian societies. The authors first identify similarities and then differences in approaches to instructional leadership across the societies. Then the findings of the synthesis are compared with broad findings from the global literature on principal instructional leadership. Design/methodology/approach The paper employs a thematic approach to synthesizing findings from the five qualitative studies. Findings The authors identified numerous similarities in practices of instructional leadership across the five societies. These included first, a top-down approach to defining the mission and goals of schools whereby principals worked within a fairly narrow zone of discretion. Second, principals devoted relatively little attention to coordinating the curriculum due to working within strict national curriculum frameworks. Third, principals executed their instructional leadership practices with an ever-present sense of the need to honor hierarchical relations and maintain harmony among staff and other stakeholders. Differences across the five societies centered on the extent to which the instructional leadership role of principals was explicitly defined and the extent to which they received training for the role. Originality/value This synthesis sought to build upon reviews of research published in a special issue of this journal two years ago. The synthesis and this body of research papers have contributed toward moving empirical research on educational leadership broadly, and instructional leadership in particular, forward in East Asia.

Impact of instructional leadership on high school student academic achievement in China

“…The conceptualisation of principals' instructional leadership may also vary by cultural context (Anderson 2008;Wang 2016;Qian et al 2017). For example, findings based on five societies in East Asia (China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore) indicated that there are differences in terms of how this construct is defined and how principals manage or influence teaching and learning (Hallinger and Walker 2017).…”

“…As school leaders, principals are regarded as the key to implementing effective policies and achieving external accountability objectives (Hallinger and Walker 2017;Walker and Qian 2018). Therefore, school principals' leadership has received considerable international interest because it is an influential variable in understanding school effectiveness Zheng et al 2017;Lai et al 2017).…”

School performance in three South East Asian countries: lessons in leadership, decision-making and training

“…Given the above, it may initially seem paradoxical that principals in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore report school-level decision making about staff development and training at roughly equal levels. It is well appreciated that teacher training is perhaps the most significant way to improve school performance in schools throughout ASEAN (Hallinger and Walker, 2017), particularly if such training includes giving school principals the skillset needed to improve teacher performance (Lee and Nie, 2017). Thus, it might be expected that higher-performing Singapore might report greater levels of decision-making by principals about teacher training.…”

“…School autonomy, leadership and accountability all have some part to play in achieving high levels of school performance, but irrespective of systemic factors, levels of training and the ways in which teachers take part in professional development may be most important and easiest to address (Hanushek and Woessmann, 2017). The right type of training improves principal effectiveness across ASEAN (Hallinger and Walker, 2017), which in turn improves teacher performance (Lee and Nie, 2017). When teachers then take control of their own professional development, the impact may be increased (Hairon and Tan, 2017).…”

Exploring Challenges in Practicing Instructional Leadership: Insights from Senior Secondary Principals

“…Thus, instructional leadership remained as the most studied model of leadership explored and examined in the area of school leadership and management [5; 2]. In the context of Asian countries, instructional leadership was considered as emerging or currently proceeding being researched compared to other studies such as the United Kingdom, United States and European countries which had inspected the effectiveness of instructional leadership within their educational systems [6,7]. Thus, the research on instructional leadership within Asian countries is considered as emerging [2,8,9].…”